FCO puts British lives at risk

The ideologically driven condem coalition government has demonstrated profound failings over their handling of the evacuation of our citizens from Libya.

When we finally started to evacuate our citizens from Egypt, during a much more peaceful revolution, we were the only country in the world to rely on privately chartered planes and furthermore to charge our citizens the princely sum of £300 for rescuing them from impending danger; despite this being the principle obligation of the State during such circumstances.

Now with the turmoil unsurprisingly spreading to Libya, for which there were weeks worth of warnings, the Foreign Office has still, days into the turmoil, failed to evacuate our citizens. As even Cyprus (where we have an air base from which such a rescue could be launched) has evacuated their citizens ours remain stranded whilst Gaddafi uses increasingly aggressive language the FCO is putting our citizens at risk.

It is utterly unacceptable that the FCO waited so long to start to consider evacuating our citizens given the precedents set by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and that they have waited and waited for privately chartered jets that have simply failed to appear rather than using the military resources at their disposal to ensure the safe evacuation of our citizens.

It is clear that the FCO is no longer capable of handling this issue and the matter should be handed over the Ministry of Defence so that our citizens can be rescued from the imminent danger posed by a regime increasingly associating the British as provocateurs in this uprising and thereby increasing the risk our citizens will be exposed to harm.

Once our citizens are safely home the PM needs to launch an urgent independent enquiry into this mess and I for one would welcome resignations from the ministerial team at the FCO.